A years long, multi-faceted project on Black and Jewish communal connection culminates in an album of new works

Published: Sep 1, 2026 | Author: Jacob Kopcienski

On their new album Generate Music (XAS Records), PRISM radically reimagines the saxophone quartet as a platform for facilitating cross-cultural artistry and community connections. The ambitious project transforms a visceral museum encounter with anti-Black and antisemitic Nazi iconography into an ecosystem of collaborations between Black and Jewish artists. From this, Generate Music has created a timely, stylistically rich, and utterly profound body of music, poetry, and dialogue.

PRISM’s Matthew Levy and the late Helen Haynes shared a deep friendship and personal connection to Jewish and Black communities in Philadelphia that nourished the project’s visionary curation. Even with a supergroup of performers and internationally renowned composers, the project’s true heart rests in substantial community programming. Reading lists provided context for Black and Jewish American life. Pre- and post-performance talks and panel discussions at Jewish and African American cultural institutions brought questions to communities in Philadelphia. The album release arrives as more than a collection of recordings. It functions as a potent distillation of the project’s lifeforce: community-driven artistry.

The opening tracks set a grand stage for the album’s stylistic terrain, emotional trajectory, and conceptual stakes. In “a makeshift,” Ursula Rucker enters as the elegant embodiment of both the griot and the cantor, intoning a litany of spiritual values and cultural practices shared in Black and Jewish traditions; PRISM flows through chorale melodies connecting stoically optimistic unisons and tense chord clusters. David Krakauer’s “The Unknown Common Ancestor” initially finds soloists hard-panned across the mix: Krakauer riffing on Klezmer clarinet, David Gilmore comping electric guitar, and Matthew Levy and Taimur Sullivan boisterously grooving in hip-hop/jazz. Alluding to Krakauer’s fusion project Abraham Inc., funk becomes a culturally heterogeneous meeting place as the ensemble joins Levy’s melody to surround the listener.